Supermicro Atom C3758 1u Superserver and IoTs

[chieften]

Hello, I am finding this server 5019A-FTN4 at a decent price but I am somewhat confused about its utility. The motherboard is an A2SDi-8C-HLN4F, Atom C3758, which is a decent offering, but it is not specific about the technologies in the 4xGbE ports. While the motherboard has Intel Quick Assist, it is not specific about any other usefulness of the ethernet.

Would virtualizing and making VLANS be more cpu intensive, is this board unable to do some virtualization on the ethernet because it is missing the chipset necessary to do so? What is the purpose of this board, since it lacks RAID, and has only 4 SATA, it doesnt seem like using it as a NAS is particularly strong. The other C3000 Superserver 5019A-12TN4 appears to have an intel i350 onboard, but also depicts an addon card in the picture. Its motherboard A2SDi-LN4F, Atom 3850, also lists the i350 onboard, so I take it that this motherboard can do more advanced networking than the former?

I cannot immediately see the benefit to this server, which is odd since Supermicro doesnt sell a superserver version with 10-GbE, instead putting that in the IoT category.

 

[chieften]

I ended up picking up the Supermicro A2SDV-16C-TLN5F, Atom 3958, and I will put it inside an SC515-R407. This motherboard has 4x 10-GBase-T from an onboard Intel X557. In the PCI-E x8 slot I'm going to deploy an Intel X710-DA2. This combination should be a strong performer as a security networking appliance, taking in a 10/1 GbE fibre connection and spitting out 4x 10GbE copper, with 16 cores and QAT 20Gbps.

I think this will be a better contender than the Xeon D series, considering the low energy and performance the C3958 can output. With Tremont just around the corner, it might be worth the wait since these processors are coming on two years old soon, but I feel that this chip in particular is a good value. I have doubts that the move to tremont will yield as big of a performance increase as the move from c2000 to c3000 yields.